Hotel Designs With Cinematic Flavor

The tiny rooms in the Jane Hotel, left, resemble staterooms in The Darjeeling Limited, below, a film about a surreal train trip through India. Credit
Gregory Goode

IT’S unlikely that anyone would base a hotel on “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Frost/Nixon” or any of the other films nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards this year. Each invokes poverty, or personal or political strife.

But hoteliers have sometimes turned to movies for design ideas. Even films as dark as “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Shining,” and Jean Cocteau’s 1946 “La Belle et la Bête” have served as inspiration for boutique hotels.

The hotel industry, which was once largely about standardization, has been moving toward specialization, which creates the need for distinctive designs, said John Arabia, a hotel analyst and principal of Green Street Advisors.

Sean MacPherson, the Manhattan hotelier, says his goal is to “create an environment that has the drama and the specialness of a film.” In a successful design, he added, “the ordinary qualities of life will be edited out.”

One of Mr. MacPherson’s favorite films is “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), about an eccentric family inhabiting a grand but slightly shabby house. When the public spaces in his Jane Hotel (which began opening in stages in 2008) are finished, he said, they will have a “Royal Tenenbaums” quality — more like a mansion in decline than a hotel. Mr. MacPherson said he admires the film’s director, Wes Anderson, for “making things 10 percent off reality — not surreal, just a little bit odd.”

In addition to “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Mr. MacPherson drew on Ethan and Joel Coen’s noirish “Barton Fink” (1991), much of which takes place in the fictional Hotel Earle. The Earle’s motto, “A day or a lifetime,” appears on stationery at the Jane. The hotel desk clerk’s uniforms resemble those created by the costume designer Richard Hornung for the film. And the tiny rooms resemble staterooms in “The Darjeeling Limited,” Wes Anderson’s 2007 film about a surreal train trip through India.

For his largest Manhattan property — the Bowery Hotel, in the East Village — Mr. MacPherson turned to an even more surprising source: Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), a horror film that takes place in the Overlook, a fictional hotel in the Rocky Mountains. At the Bowery, “There’s a bit of the feeling of the Overlook — hopefully without the creepiness,” he said. “The idea is to create something that is old and grand and hopefully slightly bigger and more storied than its guests and owners.”

Mr. MacPherson relied on another Kubrick film, “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), when he chose elements for the Bowery’s bellman uniforms, which evoke the film’s violent hooligans.

Photo

A rendering of a room in the Mondrian SoHo which is scheduled to open in late 2009. The design is reminiscent of La Belle et la Bête.Credit
Seven Art

Though the literal associations with the film might elude visitors, they will probably know that they are someplace visually distinctive, Mr. MacPherson said. “It’s very much as if you’re building a set and everyone becomes a character in the film you’re making there,” he said.

Mr. Arabia, the analyst, said that the trend toward unusual hotels reflected the desire of business travelers to mix work and pleasure by choosing lodgings that felt “cool and special.”

The danger for hotel owners, he said, is that a place that’s too unusual could become a flash in the pan.

But Mr. MacPherson, who is an owner of the hotels he designs, need not convince anyone that his design ideas are sound.

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The latest is the Mondrian SoHo, which is scheduled to open in late 2009, on Crosby Street between Howard and Grand Streets in Lower Manhattan.

At his first meeting with Morgans Hotel executives about the project, Mr. Noriega-Ortiz said, he showed stills of “La Belle et la Bête,” which he described as “more romantic and more adult” than the later Disney musical “Beauty and the Beast.”

Mr. Noriega-Ortiz said his goal was to capture the emotions, more than a specific style, of the movie. He said he hoped that, “10 years later, when you’re watching the film, you think, ‘That’s what I felt when I was in the Mondrian SoHo.’ ”

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A scene from The Darjeeling Limited.Credit
James Hamilton/Fox Searchlight Pictures

In Cocteau’s film, La Belle is dazzled by La Bête’s mystical castle, and she eventually succumbs to his marriage proposals. Mr. Noriega-Ortiz wants his hotel to be equally seductive. His hotel design, he said, “is all about enticing Beauty to say ‘yes.’ ”

The experience will start at the front door, which will lead to a mirrored courtyard, reminiscent of the rooms through which Beauty enters the castle. “You’re going to feel special arriving,” Mr. Noriega-Ortiz said.

Inside, the hotel’s public spaces will capture the “freedom of movement” that Belle feels in the castle, where she is able to pass through walls. (Cocteau achieved the effect by cutting slits in fabric panels; Mr. Noriega-Ortiz will use glass and mirrors to create diaphanous surfaces.)

It’s harder to achieve that effect in the hotel’s bedrooms, which are so compact that the designer prefers to call them “sleeping chambers.” He used as many reflective materials as possibly, turning the rooms, he said, into “little jewels in which everything shimmers.” The goal, he said, is to make guests feel “as pampered as Beauty,” though he also chose materials and colors (mostly dark blues) to appeal to men as well.

Mari Balestrazzi, Morgans’s vice president for design, said several of the company’s 11 hotels are based on books or films. Marcel Wanders, who has designed the recently opened Mondrian in Miami Beach, thought of that building as Sleeping Beauty’s castle, she said.

“It’s not something the company dictates,” Ms. Balestrazzi said. “We like to work with very creative designers, and this is part of the process some of our designers use.”

Ms. Balestrazzi described “La Belle et la Bête” as Mr. Noriega-Ortiz’s “muse,” and said that it provided both specific visual imagery as well as an organizing idea, a thread that runs through the hotel.

To Mr. Noriega-Ortiz, that organizing idea is crucial. A design, he said, “has to have a concept. Otherwise, you’re just picking furniture.”

He said the only times Morgans executives asked for revisions was when his movie references became too literal. He said he was happy to stay away from obvious references to the Cocteau film. “The last thing I want is for people to walk in and feel like they’re in a theme hotel,” he said. “That would be a real disaster.”